Her boots clicked against the pavement, echoing throughout the chamber that was the makeshift warehouse behind Capsule Corp. It was once a hangar back in the corporation's peak days, before the Androids came and and people of earth breathed the dust from the rubble of the ruins they'd left behind.
Mai reached into her pocket, pulling the crumpled box of cigarettes with a lighter contained inside from it. She halted where the front of a truck had been backed into the warehouse. The bay was open and the dawn was just barely stretching over the horizon of fallen buildings before her.
It was early autumn, but late enough in the year that the chill bit her extra hard when she ungloved her hands, causing her to drop the lighter from the box as she fumbled with the garments. She uttered a curse, stooping down to swipe the lighter from the ground with a cigarette ready between her lips. After several good flicks and and a chapped hand to guard the flame from the outside breeze, the tip ignited with a triumphant glow in the middle of hopeful drag.
The efforts to rebuild were in full force. People were starting to get married again. A second marriage post-widowing for some. Have kids. Mai had completed twelve such runs in the last month alone, just for medical supplies to accommodate the births that were occurring all over the place. It was a strange time to be alive, in between the extinction of the human race and it's subsequent rebirth.
An aluminum door opened behind her and closed again. The truck beside her shifted under the weight of the man who hopped inside of it and paced the inside like he always did, giving the straps of the boxes of supplies a good hard tug. It wasn't that necessary in her opinion; she knew how to load a truck. But Trunks was a worry wart, and he often brought up his go to cautionary tale from years back of a supply truck whose contents shifts so drastically enroute while the driver turned a sharp curve, causing the whole thing to flip over over the side of a cliff.
She knew better. And he knew that she knew better. But Trunks was stubborn and set on his rituals, so she decided that the issue was with him and not with her.
She took another drag, turning and squinting at him when she heard him hop down.
"Is everything to your liking, highness?"
He chuckled and looked downward shyly as he walked to her, pulling his hands into his coat pockets for warmth as he walked.
Mai offered him the cigarette like she usually did, and he waved a hand at her in refusal. She wasn't sure why the gesture gave her so much amusement- perhaps it was that he was so polite about it even though she knew he couldn't stand them.
"That a 'no?'" Mai smiled cheekily.
Trunks shook his head and wrinkled his nose. Mai flicked ash from the tip with the movement of her thumb.
"You know how much I hate those things." He frowned at her. "They stink."
Mai shrugged. "They're actually pretty great, it's just too bad you have that freakishly sensitive nose. Otherwise you could be enjoying them with me."
He shot her a look in the eye, with brilliant blue that suggested the clarity and calm of a careless summer sky, not the dreary grey landscape they surrounded them.
"They make you stink."
He knew how to dish it back. She liked that.
"I got these from your mom." Mai shrugged, her words muffled by the cigarette in her mouth again.
"Yeah, and she stinks too."
Mai laughed and Trunks smiled as her, arms crossed for a moment against the military grade wheels of the truck.
She couldn't deny she looked forward to her trips to Capsule corp. because of moments like this.
"You want to tell me why you're making this unplanned delivery? There's a lot of booze back there." Trunks' chin jerked in the direction of the truck against his back. some loose hairs from a ponytail fell free from where they were tucked behind his ears.
He looked good with long hair, she decided. With his angular jaw and cheekbones and those brilliant eyes he could've been quite the prettyboy in another life, dating debutants and socialites. Instead he woke every day at the crack of dawn to patrol ruins and greet grunts like her, who smoked and cussed and pissed in bushes alongside the road.
The end of the cigarette had burned close enough to the filter that the heat was beginning to sear her lips. Her eyebrows wrinkled as she pulled the stub away, dropping it to the ground to squash it with her boot.
Mai exhaled the last of the smoke the he hated and dug into her pockets for her gloves.
"The people want their booze. They ask, I deliver. And there's a lot of other things that we needed too." Mai said simply, but the raised eyebrow of her companion told her that wouldn't suffice as an explanation.
Trunks pulled open the driver's side door and help lift her inside when the time came. It wasn't necessary, but she allowed it anyway. It was kind of nice.
Midday, she saw a shadow of a man on the ground of the road before her, an image that would've been impossible unless that man were flying overhead. Mai frowned and laid on the horn, letting the man in the sky know that she knew he was there.